a boyfriend just finishing business school in California—and there was never any question that when the boyfriend came back I wasn’t to come by or contact her ever again. We both knew. She hadn’t had to say it. Galloping up the five flights to her studio, on the rare (to me) afternoons I was permitted to come see her, I was always bursting with words and feelings too big to contain but all the things I’d planned to say to her always vanished the instant she opened the door and instead of being able to engage in conversation for even two minutes like a normal person, I would instead hover speechless and desperate three steps behind her, hands plunged in pockets, hating myself, while she walked barefoot around the studio looking hip, talking effortlessly, apologizing for the dirty clothes on the floor and for forgetting to pick up a six-pack of beer—did I want her to run downstairs?—until at some point I would almost literally hurl myself at her mid-sentence and knock her over on the day bed, so violently sometimes my glasses flew off. It had all been so wonderful I’d thought I would die but lying awake afterward I’d been sick with emptiness, her white arm on the coverlet, streetlights coming on, dreading the eight o’clock hour which meant she would have to get up and dress for her job, at a bar in Williamsburg where I wasn’t old enough to stop in and visit her. And I hadn’t even loved Julie. I’d admired her, and obsessed over her, and envied her confidence, and even been a little afraid of her; but I hadn’t really loved her, no more than she’d loved me. I wasn’t so sure I loved Kitsey either (at least not the way I’d once wished I loved her) but still it was surprising just how bad I felt, considering I’d been through the routine before.
xxiii.
EVERYTHING WITH KITSEY HAD pushed Boris’s visit temporarily from my mind but—once I went to sleep—it all came back sideways in dreams. Twice I woke and sat bolt-upright: once, from a door swinging open nightmarishly into the storage locker, while kerchiefed women fought over a pile of used clothes outside; then—drifting back asleep, into a different staging of the same dream—storage unit as flimsy curtained space open to the sky, billowing walls of fabric not quite long enough to touch the grass. Beyond was a prospect of green fields and girls in long white dresses: an image fraught (mysteriously) with such death-charged and ritualistic horror that I woke gasping.
I checked my phone: 4:00 a.m. After a miserable half hour I sat up bare-chested in bed in the dark and—feeling like a crook in a French movie—lit a cigarette and stared out at Lexington Avenue which was practically empty at that hour: cabs just coming on duty, just going off, who knew which. But the dream, which had seemed prophetic, refused to dissipate and hung like a poisonous vapor, my heart still pounding from the airy danger of it, its sense of openness and hazard.
Deserves to be shot. I’d worried enough about the painting when I believed it to be safely maintained year round (as I’d been assured, by the storage brochure, in brisk professional tones) at a conservatorially acceptable 70 degrees Fahrenheit and 50 percent humidity. You couldn’t keep something like that just anywhere. It couldn’t take cold or heat or moisture or direct sun. It required a calibrated environment, like the orchids in the flower shop. To imagine it shoved behind a pizza oven was enough to make my idolater’s heart pound with a different, but similar, version of the terror I’d felt when I thought the driver was going to chuck poor Popper off the bus: in the rain, in the middle of nowhere, out by the side of the road.
After all: just how long had Boris had the picture? Boris? Even Horst, avowed art-lover, hadn’t with that apartment of his struck me as overly particular about conservatorial issues. Disastrous possibilities abounded: Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee, the only seascape he’d ever painted, according to rumor all but ruined from being stored improperly. Vermeer’s masterpiece The Love Letter, cut off its stretchers by a hotel waiter, flaking and creased from being sandwiched under a mattress. Picasso’s Poverty and Gauguin’s Tahitian Landscape, water-damaged after being hidden by some numbskull in a public toilet. In my obsessive reading the story that haunted me most was Caravaggio’s Nativity with